It's been very common in Europe for years. People even have individual heat pump at home. US is so much behind on new technologies
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‘home geothermal’ isn’t really a thing unless you’re already living on a hotspring, which is quite unusual. (delta-v is not sufficient)
At the point someone is drilling km+ boreholes and installing MW+ turbines, it’s safe to call it commercial.
Geothermal turns turbines with steam that then produces massive quantities of electricity. That makes it an energy source. The water way down under the ground in these cases is superheated by the surrounding rock, and provides plenty of high quality heat. There are no heat pumps involved.
It’s like the difference between having a pool in your backyard, and damming a huge river and installing turbines.
I’m guessing you think that if you connect the heat pumps output to it’s input, you’ll have infinite energy?
You used the energy from the wall socket to pump the heat from outside into the inside, less efficiently than you could use that heat to generate more electricity or do other work later.
Aka you pumped the energy inside and concentrated it a bit. You didn't generate more energy than you had before. You did make existing energy more useful for you, comfort wise.
Actually operating one, you'll see that the energy cost of a heat pump becomes proportionally higher as the temperature difference gets bigger, so you spend more energy moving the heat when the source is low temperature and the output is high temperature.
Many people have gotten quite frustrated when they end up chilling the ground in their ground source heat pump too much, and they end up with very inefficient systems.
You could do the exact same thing (with better or similar efficiency) by using some other source of thermal mass. Air sourced heat pumps do it with the atmosphere. It's possible to use lakes and other bodies of water.
No net usable power is being extracted from the earth in this scenario. The earth is being cooled in order to heat your house. And heated, in order to cool your house.
Geothermal power systems do produce actual usable power, and they do so by running a heat engine (the opposite of a heat pump) off an extremely large temperature difference from a very large source of underground heat. You can't run a heat engine on the output of a heat pump and produce net power, anymore than you can hook a generator to an electric motor and produce net power.
>That is not what ‘power source’ means. You probably want to read up on some thermodynamics and definitions. I’m guessing you think that if you connect the heat pumps output to it’s input, you’ll have infinite energy?
There is no answer in that whole comment to my question. However, you did answer it in the comment I am replying to:
> you pumped the energy inside and concentrated it a bit.
Yes! That's exactly right. But furthermore:
> You didn't generate more energy than you had before. You did make existing energy more useful for you, comfort wise.
This is exactly right, and it is also known as the first law of thermodynamics. [1]. There is no way to produce energy. Even with electrical generation from geothermal, we are moving energy and concentrating it a bit, as you say, just in different forms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_law_of_thermodynamics